Posts categorized "Performance"

December 24, 2010

Quietly moving through the Anselm Kiefer show at the Gagosian gallery on its final afternoon were eight people wearing black T-shirts that bore the show's portentous title—“Next Year in Jerusalem”—in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. They didn't speak unless spoken to; they took pictures of themselves standing before some equally portentous works of Holocaust-evoking art. (Everyone was taking pictures; the catalogue cost a hundred dollars.) Only if approached did one of the group explain that they were part of an organization called U.S. Boat to Gaza, which plans to sponsor a ship in the next flotilla to sail against the Israeli blockade. Half of the group had left, and they were reduced to four by the time that gallery representatives asked them to leave, unimpressed by their claims to be extending the discussion that Kiefer had begun. Morality. Guilt. Jewish tragedy, past and present. (“This is private property,” a gallerista in towering heels shot back. “We're here to sell art.”) A call to the police was threatened. In response, the activists put on their jackets—covering the offending Passover phrase, even while complaining that it had not, to their knowledge, been copyrighted—and asked if they might stay. Without reply, the representatives walked away.

Ingrid Homberg had gone to Gagosian that day to lift her spirits. A delicate blonde woman in her late fifties, she grew up in Germany—she is roughly of Kiefer's generation—but never felt that she belonged there; she moved to New York with her young daughter in 1980, and the city has proved a much happier fit. In recent years, however, she has been ill (fibromyalgia, arthritis) and suffers frequent pain. Still, she was immediately buoyed by Kiefer's magisterial landscapes, in which massive wings overhead suggest the judgment of God. The gallery was filled with such disturbing images. She had earlier noticed the people in the T-shirts, and now she approached them, hoping to discuss the feelings that the artist's work provoked.

But there was no discussion. Two police officers arrived just a moment after Homberg did, and ordered the group out. Including Homberg. She said that she had no reason to leave. She asked one of the officers—“Young man,” she addressed him, and he did look very young—why they did not allow the group to speak. And that was it. His partner grabbed her by the arm and began to pull her out. The force of the motion caused her to lose her balance; she fell. And the Gagosian's chamber of artful horrors came to appalling life, as crowds of gallery goers, on a busy Saturday afternoon, watched a police officer drag a frail and terrified woman, howling with pain, across the floor of two long rooms to the doorway.

Many people might have assumed that her cries were part of a staged scene, since the protesters were shepherded out behind her, loudly bemoaning their deprivation of freedom of speech. But on the street, Homberg pulled off her coat and rolled up her sleeve to reveal an arm thickly blotched black and blue. The officer, she explained, had not merely grabbed her arm—thin enough, and easy to grab—but had strongly pressed his fingers into the upper inner muscle as he dragged her. The result, she said, was agony.

A sympathetic bystander informed the officers that they had made a mistake: the sobbing woman was not with the group and no one had ordered her out of the gallery. They replied that they had ordered her out, and she had not complied; therefore, no mistake was made. Homberg asked to speak to someone from the gallery, but her request, when relayed, was met with conspicuous disinterest. A Gagosian representative has since expressed regret that anyone was hurt during the “unfortunate disturbance.” The New York Police Department, however, insists that Homberg was merely “escorted” from the gallery, and denies that she was dragged or mistreated in any way.

As she was bundled off for medical attention following the incident, Homberg continued to cry. She was upset, she said, because of the terrible pain, because of the shock, and because she had not been able to finish looking at the exhibition. The service of a car was offered by one of the protestors, who had somehow found time to change into a T-shirt that read “Greed Kills.”

News flash: either the staff of Gagosian Gallery hasn't been keeping up with the recent controversy over the removal of David Wojnarowicz's video Fire in My Belly from the exhibition Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, including the spectacle of another peaceful art activist being ejected and "banned for life" from the Smithsonian for quietly showing David Wojnarowicz's video on his ipad, or the Nostalgie de la Third Reich atmosphere of Anselm Kiefer's show "Next Year in Jerusalem" had rubbed off on them when on December 18th they reacted to a few activists whose activism consisted of standing around in black T-shirts with "Next Year in Jerusalem" printed on them in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, taking pictures of themselves in front of the work, & quietly answering questions by having NYPD officers forcibly eject them from the gallery.

I had wavered about whether I wanted to bother writing about the Kiefer show. The show closed last week and that would have been that until this morning when I read an email forwarded to me by artist Joyce Kozloff from one of the protesters, anti-war activist Laurie Arbeiter.

From her email:

In response to the title of the exhibition and the content of the work a small group of artists and activists decided to view the show wearing a shirt with the words Next Year In Jerusalem in the three languages Arabic, Hebrew and English. We spent about one to two hours looking at the exhibition, mainly individually, silently and respectfully with full consideration of others viewing the exhibition. We simply wore the words on our shirts and did not engage with anyone unless they struck up a conversation with us. A number of people asked some of us about the meaning of the message, gave positive feedback, showed interest, asked where they could get the shirts or occasionally questioned our political attitude toward Israel and Palestine. … We never had an incident, raised our voices, disrupted anyone, and were not approached by the multitudes of guards that were there. … We thought we were in an arena of ideas and that words on a t-shirt without any other provocation would be an acceptable method of free expression in response to Kiefer’s work. We were so very wrong.

After about one and a half hours, half of our group left and four of us remained to continue to view the show. … Suddenly, out of nowhere, two representatives from the gallery approached us. One of them asked who our leader was. It was an odd question and I responded that we had no leader. … She then said that she had to ask us to leave the gallery. … At that point, the gallery employee ordered the guards, the same ones that had observed us for close to two hours with no incident, to surround us and escort us out. I told her that there was no reason to have us removed. The gallery employee explained that they had received complaints about the words on our shirt, which were causing confusion, and therefore we would have to leave. We then decided to cover the language even though it was very disturbing to do so and we did this reluctantly, understanding the profound irony against the back-drop of the Kiefer exhibition which embodies a life’s work supposedly concerned with the horrors of state-sponsored repression, the brutality of occupation, racism, abuse of power, fascism and the consequences of forgetting history, not allowing for keen reflection in regard to current strains of unchecked power. I mentioned to the gallery employees that I thought we were in the realm of ideas inside the gallery space to which she replied that it was a private gallery in the business of selling art and that they wanted us to leave. On principle, something no longer that valued or defended in the public or private sector, we stayed, acting again in no way that could be deemed disruptive. The guards went back to their corners and we went back to our conversation. We thought that the incident was over. To all our shock, several minutes later the police arrived and completely disrupting the calm atmosphere in the gallery began to order us to leave and threatened us with arrest for trespassing.

Within minutes after the police arrived an incident unfolded that could only be described as brutal. Upon reflection, it was like a staged scene, depicting what happens when the very forces Kiefer warns us about go unchecked. The police came on very strong and at first directed their warning at us, overseen by the gallery personnel, who pointed us out to them. … The police officer was very rude and belligerent to her. All this unfolded rather quickly, within seconds and suddenly I saw him grab her forcefully, pinching the muscle of her arm as he began to drag her from the gallery. It was shocking as she was screaming that she was being hurt and yet he wouldn’t remove his grip. I heard her cry in pain all the way out as she was being removed to the entrance. …. She was badly bruised and needed medical attention and was taken to a hospital emergency room.

These are the facts of my experience as it unfolded. It was and still is traumatizing to recount and to attempt to grapple with all the implications of these events unfolding against the backdrop of the Anselm Kiefer exhibition. … Our peaceful engagement with the Kiefer exhibition was not a demonstration that day in the gallery but the gallery deserves now to be shown what a real demonstration looks like in response to what it did.

Regina José Galindo’s show at Exit Art doubles as an overdue New York
solo debut for Ms. Galindo, a Guatemalan performer and poet born in
1974, and a 10-year career retrospective. It is also easily one of the
most ambitious and moving shows by any young artist in the city at
present.

Physical violation and psychological duress, applied
on her own person, are the basic themes of Ms. Galindo’s endurance-test
performances, with poetry never far away. Poetry is uppermost in her
earliest videotaped piece, from 1999, when she suspended herself,
dressed like an annunciate angel, high over a street in Guatemala City
reading her verses aloud and dropping handwritten copies to a crowd
gathered below.

Thereafter the performance took a darker, more
carnal direction. In a 2002 work, still in an absurdist vein, Ms.
Galindo endured a pummeling from a female wrestler. Two years later, in
one of her most unnerving pieces, she submitted to — and filmed —
reconstructive surgery to her hymen, a procedure undertaken or forced
on women in the sex trade, for whom virginity, or the illusion of it,
is an economic asset.

In recent years, episodes of debasement,
self-imposed or otherwise arranged, though with unpredictable results,
increased. Ms. Galindo sealed herself in an isolation chamber, had
herself immobilized for days in a full-body cast and a straitjacket. In
the video “Social Cleaning,” she is brought to her knees by water
sprayed from a high-pressure hose, of the kind used by riot-control
police officers. In 2007, the year of the revelations of abuses at Abu
Ghraib, she had herself subjected to a version of waterboarding, then shot with a Taser until she collapsed, unconscious.

There are many precedents for this grueling, body-centered art. Marina Abramovic, Valie Export, Ana Mendieta, Gina Pane and Yoko Ono
come to mind, as, of course, does Chris Burden. But Ms. Galindo’s
version has its own fiercely focused recklessness, as well as a
distinctive set of political and personal themes that come across most
stirringly in some of her physically less extreme pieces.

In
2003, in response to the prospective election of a former leader of a
military junta, Ms. Galindo walked through the main square of Guatemala
City carrying a basin of human blood into which she periodically dipped
her bare feet, creating a track of red prints leading to the National
Palace. In a more passive performance in 2007, she lay motionless and
barely breathing on a table while a funeral parlor cosmetician applied
heavy makeup to her face as if beautifying her for burial.

As
in most of her art, the references were twofold: to the frequent and
premature deaths, through crime, poverty and disease, of women in her
volatile homeland; and to mortality as a fact of human life. The
performances do not succeed equally in joining topicality to
existential metaphor; the sight of the artist moping around in chains
has, possibly intentionally, a comedic edge. But in many pieces the
fusion works, and the cumulative effect of the show — organized by Exit
Art’s founders, Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo, with an insightful
brochure essay by Nick Stillman — is potent.

VendorBarpresents artists who will directly engage the public by presenting actions, exchanges and services that result in the production and distribution of artists editions made specifically for the event. As part of this year’s “E|AB’09 Special Events” series, VendorBar offers a unique site where interaction supersedes transaction.

October 25, 2009

FOR a country desperate for good news, the now-deflated “balloon boy”
spectacle would seem to be the perfect tonic. As Wolf Blitzer of CNN
summed up the nation’s unrestrained joy upon learning that the
imperiled boy had never been in any peril whatsoever: “All of us are so
excited that little Falcon is fine.”

Then came even better news. After little Falcon revealed to Blitzer
that his family “did this for the show,” we could all luxuriate in a
warm bath of moral superiority. No matter what our own faults as
parents, we could never top Richard Heene, who mercilessly exploited
his child for fame and profit. Nor could we ever be as craven as the
news media, especially cable television, which dumped a live broadcast of President Obama in New Orleans to track the supersized Jiffy Pop bag floating over Colorado.

Or such are the received lessons of this tale.

Certainly
the “balloon boy” incident is a reflection of our time — much as the
radio-induced “War of the Worlds” panic dramatized America’s jitters on
the eve of World War II, or the national preoccupation with the
now-forgotten Congressman Gary Condit signaled America’s pre-9/11 drift
into escapism and complacency in the summer of 2001. But to see what
“balloon boy” says about 2009, you have to look past the sentimental
moral absolutes. You have to muster some sympathy for the devil of the
piece, the Bad Dad. And you can’t grant blanket absolution to those in
the American audience who smugly blame Heene and television exclusively
for the entire embarrassing episode.

It would be lovely, for instance, to believe that cable audiences doubled in size that afternoon
because they were rooting for little Falcon’s welfare. But as Seth
Meyers and Amy Poehler would say on Weekend Update at “Saturday Night
Live,” “Really?!?” Many of those viewers
were driven by the same bloodlust that spawns rubberneckers at every
highway accident: the hope of witnessing the graphic remains of a
crash, not a soft landing.

It would also be nice to think that
the “balloon boy” viewers were the innocent victims of a dazzling
Houdini-class feat of wizardry — a “massive fraud,” as Bill O’Reilly
thundered. But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned
how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a
6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an
indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when
watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq
or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.

“They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax. His words could stand as the epitaph for an era.

In
this case, the show wasn’t even that good. But, as usual, the news
media nursed it along, enlisting as sales reps for the smoke and
mirrors. While the incident unfolded, most TV anchors hyped rather than
questioned the aeronautical viability of a vehicle resembling the
flying saucers in Ed Wood’s camp 1950s sci-fi potboiler, “Plan 9 From
Outer Space.” But no sooner had the balloon been punctured than the
press was caught in another flimflam. Reuters and CNBC delivered the
bombshell that the United States Chamber of Commerce had abruptly
reversed its intransigent opposition to climate-change legislation. The
“spokesperson” source turned out to be the invention of liberal
activists who had attempted to stage a prank press conference at Washington’s National Press Club.